Monday, August 23, 2010
CNNMoney.com: The latest real estate rip-off
Here's an item appearing in CNNMoney.com that suggests the community association industry and other backers of residential property transfer fees are going to face PR and political headwinds on this issue, which was spotlighted on this blog several days ago.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
from the story:
"Many condo and townhouse dwellers are already familiar with the "flip tax," more formally known as a resale fee. Typically calculated as a percentage of the sale price, it's a fee due to the condo association or community when an owner sells. These charges fund common-area maintenance or provide a boost to reserve funds, which benefits the association's homeowners."
I don't know where CNN gets the idea that HOA transfer fees "benefit the association's homeowners" - this is obviously a case of a reporter mindlessly parroting an industry press release.
The transfer fees imposed by HOAs are as much of a rip-off as the transfer fees imposed by developers.
Such transfer fees should offend the sensibilities of Republicans, Libertarians, Tea Partiers, Ayn Randians, or anyone else who claims to support individual private property rights. But that demographic tends to be the most craven apologists and useful idiots for Communism in 21st century America -- as long as it's corporate communism leading us down The Privatized Toll Road To Serfdom.
Lenin is often quoted as saying something like "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which the communists will hang them."
But I don't think that even Vladimir Ilyich, in his wildest Marxist dreams, could have imagined something like a Rope Owners Association that would collectively own the rope and impose a transfer tax every time that the rope is sold. And do so with the enthusiastic approval of the self-proclaimed opponents of collectivism!
Post a Comment